Confound it--there!" and he released the shining hair from his fingers
so that the air currents sent it floating back into the deeper gloom of
the cabin.

It was midnight before he went to bed. He was up with the first cold
gray of dawn. All that day he strode steadily eastward on snowshoes,
over the company's trail to the bay. Two hours before dusk he put up his
light tent, gathered balsam for a bed, and built a fire of dry spruce
against the face of a huge rock in front of his shelter. It was still
light when he wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down on the balsam,
with his feet stretched out to the reflected heat of the big rock. It
seemed to Steele that there was an unnatural stillness in the air, as
the night thickened beyond the rim of firelight, and, as the gloom grew
still deeper, blotting out his vision in inky blackness, there crept
over him slowly a feeling of loneliness. It was a new sensation to
Steele, and he shivered as he sat up and faced the fire. It was this
same quiet, this same unending mystery of voiceless desolation that had
won him to the North. Until to-night he had loved it. But now there was
something oppressive about it, something that made him strain his eyes
to see beyond the rock and the fire, and set his ears in tense listening
for sounds which did not exist. He knew that in this hour he was longing
for companionship--not that of Breed, nor of men with whom he hunted
men, but of men and women whom he had once known and in whose lives he
had played a part--ages ago, it seemed to him. He knew, as he sat with
clenched hands and staring eyes, that chiefly he was longing for a
woman--a woman whose eyes and lips and sunny hair haunted him after
months of forgetfulness, and whose face smiled at him luringly, now,
from out the leaping flashes of fire--tempting him, calling him over a
thousand miles of space. And if he yielded--